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Jam Master Jay, born Jason Mizell in the middle-class Queens, N.Y., neighborhood of Hollis, was the DJ in the legendary '80s rap band Run-DMC. He was shot and killed in a Queens recording studio on Wednesday night. We don't know what chain of events led to Jay's death yet. But it's one thing to take out 'Pac and Biggie, as devastating as those killings were to the hip-hop world. At the risk of taking thug rap at its own word, when you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Jay was 37, a married man with three kids and no particular reputation as a thug or a hard case.
Forget Aerosmith. Forget "Walk this Way," MTV and the damned Rolling Stone cover.
By the end of the eighties, if you were a kid growing up in New York or New Jersey or Connecticut -- or in my case, all three --no matter what your name was, there was nowhere you could go without having someone holler out, "Mary, Mary, why you buggin'?" It was practically the Coney Island mating call. LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Grandmaster Flash, this was boardwalk rap, Adidas rap, boomboxes-the-size-of-a-Buick rap. The Beastie Boys were still punk rockers who couldn't play their instruments. Adam Yauch couldn't have found Tibet on a map.
Run-DMC -- if you need a history lesson, Jay formed the group with Run (Joseph Simmons, brother of rap entrepreneur Russell Simmons) and DMC (Darryl McDaniels) -- were hip-hop at its most innocent. OK, so maybe it wasn't so innocent.
In 1984, when Run-DMC hollered out, "We're live as can be but we're not singing the blues/ We got to tell all y'all the good news," the good news was that rap and rock were never going to be the same. As for the bad news, well you heard it again on Wednesday night.
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